Chipzilla has pulled the plung on its Galileo, Joule, and Edison development boards.

The chip maker quietly made the announcement and few people have actually noticed.

The company said that shipment of all Intel Galileo product skus ordered before the last order date will continue to be available from Intel until December 16, 2017.

Intel will discontinue manufacturing and selling all skus of the Intel Joule Compute Modules and Developer Kits - known as the Intel 500 Series compute modules in the People's Republic of China.

Shipment of all Intel Joule products SKUs ordered before the last order date will continue to be available from Intel until December 16, 2017.

Last time orders for any Intel Joule products must be placed with Intel by September 16, 2017.

Intel will discontinue manufacturing and selling all SKUs of the Intel Edison compute modules and developer kits. Shipment of all Intel Edison product skus ordered before the last order date will continue to be available from Intel until December 16, 2017.

Last time orders for any Intel Edison products must be placed with Intel by September 16, 2017. All orders placed with Intel for Intel Edison products are non-cancellable and non-returnable after September 16, 2017.

The company has not explained the reasoning why the boards got the death penalty. Intel launched the Galileo, an Arduino-compatible minicomputer in 2013, the Edison in 2014, and the Joule last year.

The company touted the Galileo as part of Intel’s internet of things cunning plans for a while.

The UK is likely to be shut out of the much improved Euro GPS system when it is finally launched and forced to lean on whatever the US government allows it to play with.

The EU’s global positioning system (GPS) system, Galileo – which the UK helped to design and implement, was part of a 15-year collaborative project between the EU and the European Space Agency (ESA).

It started going live at the end of 2016 as an effort to end the region’s reliance on existing GPS services owned by the US, China, and Russia.

While the UK is staying part of the ESA after Brexit, it could still lose its access to the navigation system as it is currently only available to countries inside the EU.

ESA members Norway and Switzerland both had to negotiate third-party access to Galileo.

Following Brexit, the UK will also need to hold separate negotiations to re-obtain partnership to Galileo and other ESA-led space projects – including the Copernicus environmental damage monitoring system, and Horizon 2020, which aims to boost scientific research.

Scottish National Party (SNP) MP George Kerevan said some of the technology is reserved for member states to use for public services, and the UK could be locked out.

“I’m sure that a deal will be done, and the UK could pay its whack and get access, but it’s just another part of Brexit that no one’s actually thought about,” he said.

Many UK businesses which have collaborated on Galileo and hold contracts worth tens of millions of pounds to provide hardware to the project would be particularly hard hit. The head of the ESA’s EU policy office said that if Brexit goes ahead all those contracts will have to be pulled.

The European Space Agency (ESA) has announced that its Galileo satellite service has begun operations and will be providing a rival to the US GPS system.

The EU has been historically worried about depending too much on the US GPS system because there was always a remote risk that the US might switch it off. Launching its own system made some sense and now that the pro-Russian Donald (Prince of Orange) Trump has taken over the White House and pondered out loud if he is allowed to nuke Europe, the investment is looking rather wise.

Galileo is designed to ensure the region has access to its own, more accurate satellite services and will be compromised of 24 satellites once complete.

There are now 18 satellite in orbit, enough for the EC to switch it on for real-world uses. There are three initial services that Galileo will be used for.

The first is called Open Service that will work in conjunction with GPS to provide even more specific location information for smartphones and in-car navigation systems. The second is called the Public Regulated Service, which is listed as an encrypted, service for government-authorised users such as civil protection, fire brigades and the police. Finally the service can now be used on location beacons used as part of the search and rescue service Cospas-Sarsat, helping reduce location accuracy from 10km to 5km, potentially improving rescue times as a result.

Intel surprised many industry watchers when it announced Quark at IDF. This tiny x86 chip is reportedly based on an ancient Pentium core and it is said to be 10 times as efficient as an Atom.

Now it has the first subatomic product based on Quark.

The Galileo board is powered by a Quark X1000 SoC clocked at 400MHz. It is compatible with Arduino and Intel says it will help bolster its cooperation with Arduino. Intel plans to donate 50,000 Galileo development boards to 1,000 universities across the world over the next 18 months.

Intel says Galileo is designed to support shields that operate at either 3.3V or 5V. The core operating voltage of Galileo is 3.3V. The SoC is a 400MHz 32-bit Pentium (ISA) compatible part with 16kB of L1 cache and 512kB of on-die embedded SRAM. It has 256MB of DRAM, enabled by the firmware by default and an optional microSD card up to 32GB is supported.

It is the first Arduino board with an mPCIe slot and USB 2.0/microSD support also offers a few interesting possibilities. However, the added features come at a price. At $60 it’s more than twice the price of the Raspberry Pi, which has an ARM chip and sells for about $25.

You can check out all the relevant documentation over at the Intel Makers Community site, here.